Annadurai

Annadurai Synopsis: The lives of twin brothers Annadurai and Thambidurai change radically following a murder that the former commits. How does he ensure that his sibling regains his old life?

Annadurai Review: With PichaikkaranUdhay Rajkumar), who wants to head the local traders body, of which Annadurai’s father is the president. And when Annadurai gets arrested for murder, Dhayalan makes his moves and turns Thambidurai’s life upside down. How does Annadurai set things right?

For all its efforts at being an action film driven by emotions, Annadurai barely passes muster. In his efforts to build up his star, director Srinivasan fails to give us a script that makes care for the characters. The emotional scenes do not impact us as much as they should because Srinivasan fails to give us characters; what we get a placeholders — the anxious mom, the disappointed father, the supportive uncle, the needy friend, the girl with a crush, and so on. Even the climax, with a touch of A Tale Of Two Cities, doesn’t move us, despite the background score’s desperate pleas.

The characters of the antagonists, too, aren’t sketched beyond their functional roles. Dhayalan’s character, in fact, is quite topical given the recent controversy surrounding the financier Anbuchezhiyan (who gets a thanks card in the pre-titles), and Cheran Raj is quite convincing in this role, but the character is sidelined just when he seems to be a real threat. Instead, Srinivasan choses to raise the stakes with more villains, but every one of them, including Radha Ravi in a walk-on role as a MLA, feels slight, and this is why the film comes across as mere image-building exercise.